Picked

How to spell picked

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce picked

What does picked mean?

1. verbPast tense of pick: chose, selected, or gathered something.

Picked in a sentence

• She picked the cheapest flight from the list of options.

• The family picked apples in the orchard all morning.

Where does picked come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base verb 'pick' has tangled roots in Old English 'pician', meaning to prick or pierce, reinforced by the related Old Norse 'pikka', to peck or pick at. These northern European words all gathered around the idea of a sharp point poking or plucking at something, and over time the sense broadened from physically jabbing to deliberately plucking out, gathering, or choosing. By the late medieval period the modern meanings of selecting, harvesting fruit, and removing things piece by piece were all established. The regular past tense 'picked' simply adds the familiar '-ed' ending; the spelling trap is purely that the hard 'k' sound makes the ending sound like 't', so the written form keeps the 'k' of 'pick' before '-ed'. The same family lies behind words such as 'pike' (a pointed weapon) and 'pickaxe', all carrying that original notion of a sharp point.

How the word is built

• pick (to select or pluck)
• -ed (past-tense/past-participle suffix)